The summer song is a piece with some ingredients and an objective. An easy chorus to learn, a simple dance and a catchy melody and achieve a media impact on society. For all these reasons, Common People by the British group Pulp can be aired as a wicked summer song from 1995 in the United Kingdom. It didn't matter if you were washing dishes in a filthy dump, on one side or the other of a pub bar, stretching the sheets in a hotel or taking care of the children of a couple of university professors, Common people played at all hours and it was your song .
Common People is a poisonous summer song because its text is highly intelligent and well developed. Jarvis Cocker, their lyricist and co-composer, singer and band leader, has talent and restraint, irony and the same dose of self-respect as an emotional punching bag.
If we go to the essential and coarse, the song scores high. Easy to learn chorus: Wanna live with common people and its derivatives. We can remember it. Next is the dance. It didn't exist until it was time to record the video clip. At that moment, Jarvis improvised a ridiculous, parodic and robotized dance that anyone could imitate, make their own, take it as far as they want in pathetic and funny dimensions. And people got the joke and did it.
Its catchy tune is also defensible. But as in all masterpieces, it all starts with an apple that, detached from a tree, falls on the right head. Our man, Jarvis, went to Notting Hill to sell a series of records that he no longer wanted. With the money obtained he thought of buying something. He went to a nearby second-hand instrument store and picked up a Casio. When he got home, he wanted to get immediate return on the purchase and, clearly, it was the best purchase of his life. There was no enthusiasm when he took her to the rehearsal room, but the simplicity of someone using only two fingers on a keyboard to play three chords made them compare to the mammoth bombast of an Emerson piece, Lake
The song is full of good news. The interpretation of the band, the distance and the right words with which Jarvis explains the story, self-injury, bad mood and loser epic, as well as great psychological depth. Because if anyone wants to ask what the social elevator mental breakdown is all about, it's this glorious song.
The theme begins in the form of a conversation between an aborigine and Dr. Livingstone, I suppose, in the form of a Greek girl, who studies art and has made of her ability to adapt, to appear normal, to feel good in the neoprene suit of ugliness, an identity that he believes is alien to any attack or injury. She is not the millionaire father of hers. She's not some stupid tourist coming to Harrod's to shop and watch the changing of the guard. She has no qualms about eating fish'n'chips and frequenting unstoppable dives. She is something else. The problem is her blood and his is still alien.
The singer offers himself to the Greek student (perhaps Danae Stratou, current wife of the politician Yanis Varoufakis) as the singular Horace in that particular descent into the hells of the working class. Obviously, they start with a supermarket. Everything within reach, replaceable and consumable. Offers, carts and colors. If you have enough money to buy, and enough faith to endure, know that it won't get you out of anywhere.
The gist of the song is that the person who narrates the story is not a John Fogerty hustler, nor a decent Bruce Springsteen worker, but the typical Kafkaesque aberration of the so-called social elevator: stigmas, rooms, family, streets, and working-class rancor and a little melancholic dandy head, full of readings, movies, songs that speak of a stylistic ideal only within the reach of your imagination.
What differentiates Jarvis and the student is that she has a silver bullet: call dad, come home, and play rebellious as many times as she wants. Instead, he must appear ignorant to survive, and an eternal fugitive to a beauty that will forever elude him. And if ordinary people only drink, shop and fuck, it's because there's no other way to entertain themselves and feel alive. The rich live knowing that their money is inexhaustible. The poor knowing that if it reaches them, it will end and it will be worse: debts and resentment.
